Staraya Ladoga

• 1. Introduction

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  Staraya Ladoga sits on the Volkhov River today as a quiet rural settlement, 8 kilometers north of the town of Volkhov in Leningrad Oblast. But dendrochronology places its founding in 753, and for well over a century after that, it was one of the most consequential places in Eastern Europe. The oldest Arabian medieval coin found anywhere in Europe was unearthed here. Somewhere between 90% and 95% of all Arab dirhams found in Sweden passed through this single town. How does a small river settlement become the hinge point of a trading world stretching from Baghdad to the Baltic? And why do some historians call it the first capital of Russia?

• 2. Crossroads of Continents

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  Merchant vessels from the Baltic Sea sailed through Ladoga to reach Novgorod, and from there pressed on toward Constantinople or the Caspian Sea. This corridor is known as the trade route from the Varangians to the Greeks. An alternative path ran down the Volga River along the Volga trade route, past the Khazar capital of Atil, and all the way to Baghdad. Ladoga stood at the entry point of both routes. Until around 950, it ranked among the most important trading ports in all of Eastern Europe.

  The town's name itself tells the story of its geography. It derives from a tributary of the Volkhov River, whose name comes from the Finnish Alodejoki, meaning low-lying river, built from the words alode for low place and joki for river. The Varangians who dominated the settlement knew it as Aldegjuborg. The fortress at the heart of the town occupied the only spot where sea-vessels could safely harbor, because those ships could not navigate further up the Volkhov River. Geography locked the town into this role as a gateway.

  The fortress itself was rebuilt at the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries, but the logic behind its position was older than any of those stones.

• 3. Rurik and the Rus

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  According to the Hypatian Codex, compiled at the end of the 13th century, the Varangian leader Rurik arrived at Ladoga in 862 and made it his capital. The Codex is a medieval source and carries the usual uncertainties of such documents, but its account is taken seriously by historians. Rurik eventually moved his seat to Novgorod, and his successors moved again from there to Kiev, where the foundations of Kievan Rus were laid.

  At the outskirts of Ladoga, several large burial mounds known as tumuli mark the landscape. One of them is said to be Rurik's grave. Another is attributed to his successor Oleg. The Heimskringla and other Norse sources record that in the late 990s, Eric Haakonsson of Norway raided the coast and burned the town.

  The town's connection to Scandinavian royalty did not end with Rurik. In 1019, Ingigerd of Sweden married Yaroslav of Novgorod. Under their marriage settlement, Yaroslav gave Ladoga to his wife. She appointed her father's cousin, the Swedish earl Ragnvald Ulfsson, to govern the town. At least two Swedish kings, Stenkil and Inge I, spent their youth in Ladoga, and possibly also King Anund Gårdske. The town was not merely a trading post but a place where ruling dynasties formed their early years.

• 4. Novgorod's Shadow

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  By the 12th and 13th centuries, Ladoga operated as a trade outpost of the Novgorod Republic. Its role was more defined but also more limited. The town belonged to Vodskaya Pyatina of the Republic and held eighty-four homesteads in the 15th century, with most of the land belonging to the church. The Novgorodians built a citadel there with five towers and several churches.

  Two mid-12th-century churches still stand: St. George and Mary's Assumption. Inside St. George's, frescoes from that same century remain visible. A third church of that era, dedicated to St. Climent, survives only as ruins. The Assumption Nunnery and a monastery dedicated to St. Nicholas, built mainly in the 17th century, are also present.

  As new fortresses such as Oreshek and Korela were built further west in the 14th century, Ladoga's military value faded. By the 15th century most of its population had turned to fishing. The great trading routes that once ran through the town had moved on to other nodes.

• 5. Peter's Renaming

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  In 1703, Peter the Great founded the town of Novaya Ladoga, meaning New Ladoga, closer to the bank of Lake Ladoga. The following year, in 1704, the original settlement took the name Staraya Ladoga, meaning Old Ladoga, to distinguish it from the new town. The name change was not merely administrative. It marked the formal end of the old settlement's centrality. A town that had once been called the first capital of Russia was now defined in relation to a newer foundation nearby.

• 6. An Artists' Colony

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  Staraya Ladoga drew Russian painters for much of the 19th and 20th centuries. Ivan Aivazovsky, Orest Kiprensky, Aleksander Orlowski, Ivan Ivanov, and Alexey Venetsianov all came in the 19th century. Vassily Maximov, who became a member of the Imperial Academy of Arts and the Peredvizhniki group, was born and died there. He painted scenes from peasant everyday life.

  Nicholas Roerich painted studies in Staraya Ladoga during the summer of 1899 and later named this landscape the finest in Russia. Valentin Serov, Konstantin Korovin, and Boris Kustodiev also worked there. Alexander Samokhvalov visited multiple times in 1924-1926, taking part in the restoration of St. George's Church. He later wrote that the experience helped him understand the relationship between monumental painting and architectural form. From those visits came his painting Staraya Ladoga from 1924 and Family of Fisherman from 1926, now in the Russian Museum.

  In February 1945, the former estate of the prince Shakhovskoy was handed to Leningrad artists as a place for rest and creative work. Restoration of the estate continued for fifteen years from 1946, but artists began arriving even in the 1940s. The House of Creativity known as Staraya Ladoga opened permanently in the early 1960s and remained an active center of Russian art life for thirty years.

  During the 1970s and 1980s, new buildings were added as the House of Creativity expanded. Artists stayed for one to two months at a time at no personal cost. Housing, food, and travel were covered by the Art Foundation of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. Work produced there entered major Soviet museum collections and private collections in Russia and abroad, and formed the basis of an extensive collection of painting, graphics, and sculpture now held by the Staraya Ladoga museum itself. Financing stopped in the early 1990s when the USSR dissolved and the Art Foundation was liquidated. The House of Creativity closed.